Jack / Reaper / Audacity / sound and recording weirdness

[morrows_end]

I got a USB microphone (the MXL USB.006 to be exact.) In my migration of music software to mint from windows, I choose to install Reaper in Wine. Following all the tutorials online for how to get USB mics working in ubuntu, I installed the Mic. Here are the problems:

When I first plug in the microphone, I can go into audacity and it works somewhat as long as I have the correct input and output devices selected in the preferences. (sometimes it won't allow me to record more than one track.)

I must run Jack to get Reaper (my preferred software) to work. The weirdness starts here as I must set Jack up a certain way in order to get the USB mic to work. I must select the interface as "hw:1 USB Audio CODEC". This allows me to record fine in Reaper, but I loose the ability to playback.

To be able to play sound through Reaper, I must stop jack, go into the configurations and select the interface "default" or "hw:0 HDA Intel", restart Reaper , and restart Jack. But when I do this, I can no longer record using the USB mic. So multitracking is impossible. The same problem occurs with Wavosaur (running in wine as well.)

After running jack, even after I quit it and reset my sound preferences, No linux programs make any sounds (using the ALSA driver) except firefox allows sound from youtube, etc. Audacity cannot playback sound regardless of what output device I choose (the options in the record list are shown as if the USB microphone weren't even attached.) All the music players on the system can no longer ouput sound to the speakers, neither can sound recorder. Though I can still record sounds into audacity, etc.

Preferably, I'd like to be able to use Reaper for multitrack recording (bot playback and record) using my USB mic and not loosing the sound for all my other programs in linux. Not too much to ask right? j/k

If anyone has any ideas or options I have missed, please let me know I can provide screenshots of settings screens if needed for clarity.

[morrows_end]

I really hate to reply to my own post, but I figured it out. It just took some fine tuning in jackd. The mic is still pretty quiet, so I still have to work on that, but I can now use the USB mic in Reaper AND playback as well.

I set the input as hw:1,0 (the USB microphone) and the output as hw:0,0 (my soundcard.) This works as long as I have the frames/period set low at 512 (gives a high latency, about 23.2ms.)

this is the command I used in the terminal:

Code: Select all

 jackd -d alsa -D -P hw:0,0 -C hw:1,0 

based on that, I played with qjackctl and finally got that working. The verbose output shows this command works:

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jackd -p128 -dalsa -r44100 -p512 -n2 -D -Chw:1,0 -Phw:0,0 

I hope this can be of help to others new to linux music stuffs.

--morrows_end